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Comment by alphanullmeric | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t say you couldn’t take philosophy courses, the fundamental issue that that you’re trying to force others to fund it for you. The same way I don’t support subsidies for Lockheed. This is a big thing I experienced in my undergraduate, it was always arts students trying to force things onto others. They simultaneously force their courses onto everyone else through breadth requirements while not having any breadth requirements themselves.

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We just fundamentally disagree about what is important in life. If education does not become a public funded "burden" then it becomes a luxury of the rich. And yes, education can *and should* be more than just preparation for your role as a cog in society. I cannot take courses in philosophy if there is no one to teach those courses.

I never experienced anything like what you're talking about. I was happy to have elective courses because that meant I was able to study things that interested me outside of my planned career path. It sounds like you view education as some purely transactional profit driven, ROI, productivity is the only measure of success nonsense and to my previous comment - that is sad to me.

If philosophers wouldn’t exist without forcing others to give them money, then that reinforces their worthlessness. After all, someone’s usefulness is by definition how much others are willing to give for something they do, and for philosophers that quantity seems to be $0. Sciences seem to have no such problem with voluntary funding, bell labs is a great example.

If you went to a school where STEM students were forced to take a humanities course but humanities students did not have to take a calculus sequence, then you experienced the thing I described.

>After all, someone’s usefulness is by definition how much others are willing to give for something they do, and for philosophers that quantity seems to be $0.

I can only repeat my point so many times, this is exactly the outlook on life I find to be sad and ignorant. Philosophy doesn't poof into non-existence when it isn't supported by taxes, it becomes a playground for the rich and the rich get to decide what schools of thought are worth pursuing.

>If you went to a school where STEM students were forced to take a humanities course but humanities students did not have to take a calculus sequence, then you experienced the thing I described.

I did not view it as forced to take humanities courses, but as an opportunity to take humanities courses. I will also say that, if my memory serves, those humanities students were forced to take certain math courses (Algebra & Statistics). I agree that those same students would benefit greatly from being "forced" to take calculus courses - there are number of interesting philosophical concepts covered in calculus.

And I don’t care what kind of useless endeavours that rich people want to pursue as long as they’re not forcing others to pay for it.

There is virtually no connection between math and philosophy. If you decompose a “mathematical philosophy” textbook into its mathematical and philosophical components you will quickly see which part is wasting paper.

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